The new Mac Pro: will professionals embrace Apple’s brave, expensive vision of the desktop?

There’s no doubt that Apple’s brand-new Mac Pro is as much a statement as a computing tool. From its dramatic introduction at WWDC 2013 (marked by SVP Phil Schiller’s bravado) to its radically engineered internals, the Mac Pro is meant to remind the public that no other company designs or builds hardware quite like Apple. At $ 2,999 — $ 500 more than the outgoing model — its price is also a statement. It’s a powerful, beautiful, aspirational computer that makes very little sense for the vast majority of the population. However, it’s a computer Apple felt it had to make.

The question facing Apple now: is the Mac Pro still a computer that professionals in fields like photography, videography, and audio (once Apple’s…